Four years ago I shared an idea to make tabular data responsive. Browser support was experimental and the workarounds were extremely hacky. I revisited the technique this week, cleaned it up, and I am pleased to say all modern browsers work perfectly.

With engagement down and confusion up, Facebook and others stop using hamburger menus

James Archer writes:

The hamburger menu is one of the more embarrassing design conventions of recent years, and it’s time to stop thinking of it as a default, unquestioned solution for mobile navigation.

Our team fell for it, too. We had reservations, of course, and talked through possible alternatives, but for about a year and a half it was the established industry convention for dealing with mobile navigation. Our clients were asking for it, everyone was talking about how great it was, and there wasn’t yet enough data to have clear answers one way or another. We launched a lot of sites that use hamburger menus. We did the best we could with what our industry knew at time.

However, the data’s in now. The hamburger menu doesn’t work well, and it’s time for everyone to move on. At this point, there aren’t many good excuses for using them in new site designs, and it very well may be worth revisiting older sites to see if they might perform better with an updated navigation structure.

Facebook Developers explain how they include ~200 byte preview JPEG images in user profile JSON payload to speed up load times

Facebook profiles can be slow to download and display. This is especially true on low-connectivity or mobile networks, which often leave you staring at an empty gray box as you wait for images to download. This is a problem in developing markets such as India, where many people new to Facebook are primarily using 2G networks. Our engineering team took this on as a challenge: What could we design and build that would leave a much better first impression?

How a change in preview photos helped speed up profile and page loads by 30 percent.

Categories

Meta

Ken Snyder is a Software Craftsman specializing in PHP and JavaScript. Ken works in Salt Lake city for Right Intel.
He is the co-founder of UtahJS, an educational non-profit aimed at promoting JavaScript in Utah.